The Legend Of Unicorns Explained

Unicorn stories are a cross-cultural phenomenon. But not every variant involves the possible horndoggery of an animal that you catch by letting it drink from the ample mammary of an attractive woman. That's not because the boob trap falls flat in the other tellings, which would presumably describe those failures as "milk duds." While unicorns are universally elusive and magical in these myths, these nonexistent historical animals are far from uniform.

Take, for example, the millennia-old account by the Chinese sage Fu Hsi. As detailed by the American Museum of Natural History the Asian unicorn "resembled a deer but had shining scales like a dragon." It had magical symbols and signs emblazoned on its back. This unicorn sported a single flesh-covered horn. But some of its Eastern cousins had two or three. The creatures are symbols of wisdom and power. European unicorns always played hard-to-get. And sometimes they would get your goat because they had goat torsos. Others were basically one-horned horses with goat hooves, possibly a goat's beard, and the tail of a lion, horse, or goat.

Italian explorer Marco Polo thought he spotted live unicorns. Much to his dismay, they were "very ugly brutes to look at" and "not at all like" the pristine creatures that cuddled with virgins in widespread accounts of his era. These were mud-loving beasts with a single black horn, buffalo-like hair, elephant feet, and "[heads] like a wild boar's." Polo was probably body-shaming Sumatran rhinos.

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